Weird hardware mod ???

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Sun Jan 25 00:11:53 CET 2009


Rask Ingemann Lambertsen wrote:
>    This is the part that worries me the most. The signals I'm after are
> available at the H-BTFPO01 test points, but that's on the front side, which
> IIRC is glued to the display, right?

The display is glued to some black rubbery sheet. In recent models,
it's pretty hard to remove. I once tried but gave up. In older
models, it comes off easily. Underneath, you may find a thin but
fairly strong plastic film that you have to peel off to get at the
contacts.

>    The "plan" is to buy a consumer packaged USB hub and rip out the PCB from
> it, with IC still soldered to it, and trim the PCB as much as possible, just
> as in the Asus Eee PC mod I referred to.

That's probably way too big to fit anywhere in the case. I'd recommend
to start simple: forget the hub, just remove BT (you may even want to
reuse the space it takes in the case), and just take power from any
convenient source, without worrying about power saving and the like.

Spend some time taking your Neo apart and getting a feeling for the
spaces inside the case. If you need to make a PCB to mount the camera
module, design it and then make a mockup to see if it fits. One
warning: if you enter the "embedded air" cavities in the middle piece
of the case, you have to leave space for the top to enter and lock.

Once you have gotten the simple variant to work, you'll have a better
feeling for how you can proceed. Finding a suitable USB hub may be
hard if you want everything to still fit in the case. Perhaps a chip
like the SMSC USB2512 (36QFN, 6x6mm) will work.

>    It would also be nice to have the GSM buzz fix worked out before applying
> homebrew mods to the GTA, if for nothing else to prevent conflicts over the
> space they occupy. Last I read, the buzz fix will take up some of the (so
> far) unused space in the GTA.

I'm not sure if this area will be a great help. You could put some
small PCB or other components there, but you don't have much vertical
space.

If you don't care about fitting things inside the case, you have of
course much more freedom.

- Werner



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